Climate change and Island food security

Our Vancouver Island communities keep growing — in many cases usurping valuable farmland and placing excessive demands on our water resources — with little thought as to how we’re going to feed these masses.

Half a century back, we produced 85 per cent of our food here on the Island; today we produce about five per cent.

Nearly 70 per cent of all B.C. vegetable imports come from the U.S., with more than 50 per cent of those from California — but not if there ain’t no water.

Enter climate change and the attendant California droughts, the worst in the last 1,200 years. Still, if you believe our local governments’ farcical sustainability plans, we don’t have a worry in the world. As Mark Twain observed: “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”